-logic raid-controller) and found it to be a very nice machine. > > But again, they also offer (the same?) Broadcom networking on board. > Just like Dell and HP. And it is a LSI Logic sas-controller on board, so > if FBSD has trouble with either of those, its hard to find anything > suitable at all in the market. > You may want to search the bsd -stable and -hardware archives for confirmation on this, but I believe the RAID/SAS issues have been fixed in -stable and 6.2-beta1. The bce0 driver appears to have been fixed more recently, but it's looking like it'll be fixed for the next round of beta testing. With any hardware for a critical server, you need to ensure redundancy (RAID, etc) and for a critical server, you probably want either an automatic spare hd failover done by the RAID (the 2950 RAID can be configured to do this) or an entire spare server/replication solution. While x86 class dells aren't even in the same ballpark as say an IBM iSeries/pSeries for reliability, I haven't found their more recent boxes (2850, 2950) to be significantly worse than other vendors (HP might be a little better, but it's still x86 class hardware). HTH - Bucky
